With the rapid development of Chinese economy and construction, various heat exchangers are more and more widely used in every field of production and living.
In the heat exchangers such as an automobile air conditioner, the receiver used as a container for storing the liquid refrigerant is an indispensable component of the heat exchanger. The main functions of the receiver are to store the refrigerant, filter the impurity and absorb the moisture. Taking the automobile air conditioner for example, the main structural types of the receiver may include a sight glass base type, a head type, an upper/lower receiver body type and a supercooling type structure type. At present, the upper/lower receiver body type receiver is more and more widely used by automobile air conditioner manufactures at home and abroad.
Reference is made to FIG. 1 which is a partial structural schematic view of a typical receiver.
The typical receiver belongs to the upper/lower receiver body type receiver, which has an elongated contour and is formed by welding a first receiver body assembly and a second receiver body assembly after the two assemblies are assembled. The first receiver body assembly includes a first receiver body 11 provided with an inlet hole 111 and an outlet hole 112. The outlet hole 112 is a single through hole and an outer diameter of an outer end thereof is constant. The outlet hole 112 is cooperated, via the outer wall thereof, with other elements. The inner end of the outlet hole 112 of the first receiver body 11 is provided with a metal filter screen 13 and a filter 14. A retaining plate 15 is mounted on the metal filter screen 13 by spot welding generally. After the metal filter screen 13 and the retaining plate 15 are mounted to the first receiver body 11, inwardly protruded dots 16 are provided on the first receiver body 11 by dotting to thereby limit the retaining plate 15 via the inwardly protruded dots 16. In the operating process, the refrigerant flows, from the inlet hole 111 of the first receiver body 11, into the receiver after being filtered by the metal filter screen 13, and then flows out of the receiver after being filtered by the filter 14 and the metal filter screen 13.
One of the main functions of the receiver for an automobile air conditioner is to filter the impurity, for example, the impurity having a size larger than 60 micrometers. Therefore, the filter generally employs a material of non-woven fabric. In order that the non-woven fabric filter has sufficient filter capacity, the non-woven fabric filter should have a high density. However, the higher the density is, the larger the flow resistance of the hole suffers. The filter is mounted at the inner end of the outlet hole, therefore the effective flow area of the filter is the portion corresponding to the outlet hole. The load of the air conditioner system becomes higher in cases that the flow resistance of the filter to the refrigerant is high. Where being compressed, the density of the non-woven fabric or other filter elements is increased and the porosity is decreased, therefore the filter precision is increased, however, the flow resistance is accordingly increased. The high pressure end of the automobile air conditioner system has no sufficient supercooling degree since the flow resistance is large, more refrigerant is needed to achieve the same cooling effect. If the flow resistance is too large, the load of the compressor will be increased and the compressor may even be damaged.
Therefore, there is an urgent demand for those skilled in the art to ensure the filter precision as well as to reduce the flow resistance of the filter to the refrigerant, and to reduce the workload of the heat exchanger.